Thursday, October 15, 2009

I have a friend who was recently frustrated by hearing about all the other moms who were "Supermoms", making extensive homemade dinners, sewing, having sparkling clean houses, and making homemade Halloween costumes and all that crap. Horse Hockey.

No such thing as a Supermom.

There is No Perfect Mother. Only Moms. Moms who have to choose their battles. Battles with kids, battles with the cleaning. Moms who choose to cook, clean, or play, or choose to lay on the floor and raspberry the baby's belly rather than dust and vacuum for the 47th time in a week. Every Mom is different, God plans it that way. He provides the Mom that is best for that family.I'm afraid I have been a contributor to her frustration. I don't clean. I Can applesauce.I don't cook dinner. I bake pumpkin bread and cookies. Or at least I try to.

And I've been trying to make the boys Halloween costumes. Only that's been a remarkable failure too!

Last fall when we went to Zoo Boo, we had just found out Sam was going to be a boy, and everywhere I looked I saw adorable little boys in costumes, brothers that were Batman and Robin, or a Cowboy and an Indian. Chris was coming off a high from VBS that was about Veggie Tales. Suddenly it hit me, we'd have a little Blob by Halloween of this year. Blob...Bob...Bob the Tomato. Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber from Veggie Tales. Perfect. So as soon as Halloween was over, I started hunting, only couldn't find infant costumes for Bob. At all. OK, I thought, I'll just make them. We found a recipe online, that called for a sweatshirt and a sock. Dye the sock to match the sweatshirt for the noses. Only I couldn't find socks in green and red to match plain sweatshirts. I thought, I'll buy white ones and dye them. Only that was really hard. 7 shops looking for plain white sweats....Wal-mart had them but not sweatpants, so I had to buy girls' leggings. And I bought the last two children's small white sweatshirts in the store. When Chris went to school yesterday, I dyed them. What was supposed to become 'Scarlet' and 'Dark Green' came out dark pink and a tealy olive green. Yipes. Those were going to be some FUNKY looking Veggie Tales. Chris saw the green outfit, and didn't care, he wanted to wear it right now! So I put it on him. He was thrilled.

A friend recommended dying it again, so after the boys went to bed, Eric ran out for more dye, 2 boxes of each color this time! So, I soaked, rinsed, and by the time all was said and done AGAIN, it was almost midnight. I was so tired. Eric put them in the dryer and we went to bed. This morning, he restarted the dryer, saying they were wet. I left the house without even seeing how they turned out, and was gone until naptime. At which time, I went downstairs to see how the sweats and socks turned out.

Oh it's not good. My son's red sweatshirt, looks like it got splashed with green dots. It's ruined. Ruined. The green sock has a red haze, and the red stuff is red and green. I don't know what to do now. Maybe just let Chris wear the green stuff around the house. But I feel like a fat failure. I can't even dye a sweatshirt, let alone achieve the lofty goal of 'homemade Halloween costume'. No Blob the Tomato here, I guess. I'm so bummed.

ahhh...sorry it didn't work out. My mom just took a bunch of fabric dyeing workshops this summer. I'm not sure if she has those colors, but she would at least be a good person to bounce ideas off of if you are interested.